1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to computer software and more specifically to computer automated services. The invention relates even more specifically to automated voice processing systems.
2. Description of Related Art
With today""s explosive growth in both the computer and the telecommunications industries, companies are increasingly looking for ways in which to leverage their information systems operations by merging previously separate functions. A common example of such a technological marriage is the wide-ranging acceptance of voice processing systems that provide menuing and other automated services to callers. One such product in this field is DirectTalk; a cross-platform licensed program product used by private industry, colleges and universities, and government agencies. (DirectTalk is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in Armonk, N.Y.) However, as the demand for such products grows, customer-desired functionality sometimes jumps ahead of official product releases.
One limitation of these automated services involves the use of call archives. These archives are records of past calls, and often, the data contained in them is mission critical for the organization. In many cases, in fact, these logs present themselves as billable records, without which a customer organization would be unable to collect revenue from various clients. Here, unfortunately, a problem with the current designs presents itself. Calls may be archived in various time intervals, such as weekly, monthly, or any other desired period. However, the archived records can only be printed for the interval for which they have been archived.
At first, the problem with this may not be apparent. However, in considering that high-volume call centers find the need to archive call information daily, the dilemma begins to show itself. In such high-volume centers, the records have to be printed daily and inserted into physical files. Then, at the end of the billing cycle, the customer organization has to assign people the tedious task of manually adding up the call records from all of the daily printouts. This wasteful exercise has been a source of great frustration to organization customers and has reduced their satisfaction with these products.
A solution to this problem is so greatly desired that organization clients have spent tens of thousands of dollars on information technologist (IT) specialists to find a work-around. Therefore, it is desirable to have an automated caller service that has the ability to print phone activity records for any range of dates, regardless of the archiving frequency, thus freeing organization customers from menial tasks and saving them money.
The present invention provides a method for managing phone activity records in an automated voice processing system. In a preferred embodiment, phone activity data from the automated voice processing system is periodically written into a first file. The phone activity data corresponds to a period of time. Prior data in the first file is overwritten each new time phone activity data is written into the first file. Prior to data being overwritten in the first file, the phone activity data from the first file is placed into a master file with prior phone activity records. The master file provides a history of phone activity within the automated voice processing system.